The Sanskrit Mahābhārata did not receive a commentary until the eleventh century. Well before then, however, it had become a central feature of Indian high culture, adapted by poets and dramatists, deliberated on by philosophers and aestheticians. Over the past century scholars have usefully examined these early treatments for what they tell us about the history of the Mahābhārata’s text. The commentaries, some of which establish a version of the text, have been put to similar text-historical use.

In this lecture I will argue for the value of the material that lies outside the boundaries of the epic proper, not in writing the history of the text, but in writing the history of that text’s meaning to its readers. An interest in the history of the reception of ancient canonical texts through their commentaries and related paratexts has gained prominence in the study of the literary traditions of other parts of the world, because of its inherent interest and its utility for intellectual history. With some exceptions, the Indological field has remained hesitant about reception studies, in part because it is perceived to open the door to anachronistic readings, thereby violating a governing disciplinary principle, that of historicism. And yet built into this Indological stance is a contradiction, due to the huge extra-academic importance in the present of Sanskrit texts like the Mahābhārata.

In 1942, the founding editor of the Poona edition, V.S. Sukthankar, delivered a series of seminal lectures, ‘On the Meaning of the Mahābhārata,’ that is representative of the quandary. Sukthankar proposed a meaning for the epic working from within the text itself. He did not rely on the commentators, epitomizers, poets, or literary theorists, yet in ruling out possibilities he did use as an argument the brute fact of the importance of the Mahābhārata to the Indian people. The idea of the Mahābhārata as India’s national epic whispers through the twentieth century scholarship, and yet its popularity in the present is neither an automatic result of its antiquity nor an accident of modernity.

The text was composed to create a remembered past. Over time its transmitters adjusted that memory and the text itself as they performed it, codified it, and used it as a point of departure. Survivals of this process are abundant in the Mahabharata’s poetic and dramatic recreations and occasional pieces, and especially in its ancillary literature: its commentaries, its versified summaries, its indices, and its ‘satellite texts,’ that is, marginal verses and other materials, some of which crept into the body of the epic over time.

If for nothing else, the history of the reception of the itihasa of the Bhārata clan through this material can serve as a way to confirm or disconfirm historical claims about the epic’s meaning, either as invented or as original, especially when the claims are presented as justiciable only by experts, or when the claims pretend to speak for a collective indigenous understanding that is inaccessible to those not native to the culture. Special reference will be made to episodes with elephants, either actual or imaginary, and to the Arthaśāstra.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / DiscussionFri, 16 Aug 2019 08:14:12 -04002019-09-20T16:30:00-04:002019-09-20T18:00:00-04:00Weiser HallCenter for South Asian StudiesLecture / DiscussionChristopher Minkowski, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of OxfordThe Making of the Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent (September 23, 2019 9:00am)https://events.umich.edu/event/65234
65234-16563503@events.umich.eduEvent Begins: Monday, September 23, 2019 9:00amLocation: Tisch HallOrganized By: Center for South Asian Studies

This conference celebrates the upcoming publication of the two-volume Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent (co-edited by David Gilmartin, Prasannan Parthasarthi, & Mrinalini Sinha). The texts will mark the centenary of the original Cambridge History of India (published in 5 volumes between 1922-1937) as well as the 75th anniversary of the Independence and Partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

The new volumes will comprise approximately 70 commissioned essays, covering the history of the modern Indian subcontinent from the founding of the Mughal Empire to the early 21st century. The two-volume Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent will both reflect the changing contours of the region’s historiography since the 1980s and suggest openings for new directions.

The conference is open to the public.
The conference is made possible by the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of History, and the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan.

Conference Schedule
1014 Tisch Hall

Sept 23

9:00-9:15 Welcome

Session One (9:15 – 11:15) Contours of a Colonial Order

Mithi Mukherjee, “Evolution of the colonial state”
Kaushik Roy, “The Indian Army and the Garrison State, 1830-1918”
Gopal Balachandran, “India, the ‘World Economy,’ and the Emerging World Order”

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Conference / SymposiumThu, 05 Sep 2019 09:43:42 -04002019-09-23T09:00:00-04:002019-09-23T19:00:00-04:00Tisch HallCenter for South Asian StudiesConference / SymposiumPortrait of a Group of BrahmansThe Making of the Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent (September 24, 2019 9:30am)https://events.umich.edu/event/65234
65234-16557457@events.umich.eduEvent Begins: Tuesday, September 24, 2019 9:30amLocation: Tisch HallOrganized By: Center for South Asian Studies

This conference celebrates the upcoming publication of the two-volume Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent (co-edited by David Gilmartin, Prasannan Parthasarthi, & Mrinalini Sinha). The texts will mark the centenary of the original Cambridge History of India (published in 5 volumes between 1922-1937) as well as the 75th anniversary of the Independence and Partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

The new volumes will comprise approximately 70 commissioned essays, covering the history of the modern Indian subcontinent from the founding of the Mughal Empire to the early 21st century. The two-volume Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent will both reflect the changing contours of the region’s historiography since the 1980s and suggest openings for new directions.

The conference is open to the public.
The conference is made possible by the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of History, and the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan.

Conference Schedule
1014 Tisch Hall

Sept 23

9:00-9:15 Welcome

Session One (9:15 – 11:15) Contours of a Colonial Order

Mithi Mukherjee, “Evolution of the colonial state”
Kaushik Roy, “The Indian Army and the Garrison State, 1830-1918”
Gopal Balachandran, “India, the ‘World Economy,’ and the Emerging World Order”

Ten undergraduate students were selected to be 2019 Summer in South Asia Fellows. Fellows designed, implemented, and enacted their proposals for their summers in India. At the symposium, students will share their experiences in India, drawing from their internships, research, and interactions with the culture.

Meet the fellows here: sisa.ii.lsa.umich.edu/

The symposium will be followed by a reception.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

In a longer project called The Postcolonial Commons, I am interested in the emergence of fluid political subjectivities around questions of defending existing commons, and creating new ones, in two regions of India: of small-scale fishers in coastal Kerala, and small farmers in the Garhwal region of present-day Uttarakhand state. I am in conversation with strands of contemporary political theory (represented, among others, by Hardt and Negri, Federici, de Angelis, Zizek, and Bauwens) that posit a future organised around ‘the commons’. However, while these writings are futuristic, I suggest that they have an underpinning narrative of the transition from the ‘pre-capitalist commons’ to the ‘commons unmade through capitalism’, which has implications for the political imaginaries outlined in their works. I challenge their orthodox account of this transition with drawing on writings on ‘postcolonial capitalism’, including my own recent work.

For this seminar, I offer two sections of the ‘historical’ part of the larger project: a discussion of the historiographical challenges in reconstructing ‘the pre-capitalist commons’ and the transitions it undergoes ‘under capitalism’ in relation to Kerala fisheries and Garhwali forests, and the limits of the ‘commodity frontiers’ approach to narrate this process. Among other things, the very nature of ‘rule’, and the problems of establishing it in these ‘unruly’ spaces, has a bearing on the sources – rather, the lack thereof – on which an account of such a process can be reconstituted. Accounts are few, and the reliability of some sources is uncertain, for much of the period of early colonial conquest. And what accounts there are do not point to the transformation of fish or forest into ‘commodities’ until relatively recently. Nor are capitalist production relations visible in any meaningful sense. The conditions for fish and forests becoming ‘commodities’, and for the emergence of capitalism in these sectors, come from a number of scientific, technological and other governmental innovations under late-colonial and early-postcolonial developmentalism. I conclude by identifying the implications of my account for radical political theory of the commons.

Subir Sinha studied History at the University of Delhi (BA) and Political Science at Northwestern University (MS, PhD), and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Vermont. His research interests are institutional change, sustainable development, social movements, state-society relations in development, and South Asian politics, with a current focus on decentralised development in India, early postcolonial planning, and on the global fishworkers' movement.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

The Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies (A/PIA) Program & the Ambedkar Association of North America have co-organized a symposium at the University of Michigan to address the theme “Dismantling Casteism and Racism.” The symposium will examine the contemporary and historical intersections between anti-racist and anti-caste struggles in South Asia and the U.S. (Room TBD)

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Ph.D. is an award-winning scholar, political theorist, and one of the most prominent anti-caste activists and intellectuals in India. He is currently the director of the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University. Prof. Shepherd’s most recent publications include Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times (with co-writer Durgabai Vyam, 2007) and a memoir titled From a Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual (2019).

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a U.S.-based filmmaker, transmedia artist, and Dalit rights activist. She is the founder of Equality Labs, an organization that uses community research, socially engaged art, and technology to end the oppression of caste apartheid, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. In 2015, Soundararajan was was a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation fellow, during which time she helped curate #DalitWomenFight, a transmedia project and activist movement.

Ronald E. Hall, Ph.D. is Professor of Social Work at Michigan State University. His research specializations includes a focus on intraracial racism, colorism, caste, and mental health. His publications include The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (edited), and The Scientific Fallacy and Political Misuse of the Concept of Race.

Ankita Nikalje is a Doctoral Student in the Counseling Psychology program at the College of Education at Purdue. Her research focuses on the continued psychological impacts of colonization in South Asian populations, and seeks to understand how historical oppression and current experiences of racism impact mental and physical health.

Manan Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Program of Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies and the Department of American Culture.

Co-sponsored by the Department of American Culture, the Center for South Asian Studies, the Barger Leadership Program, the Department of History, the Department of English Language & Literature, the Periyar Ambedkar Study Circle, the Association for India’s Development

What explains the electoral dominance of a single party over a prolonged period of time in a democracy? Focusing on the case of the Indian National Congress in India, Ziegfeld argues that authoritarian-era politics can influence the likelihood of single-party dominance after democratization. More specifically, when the authoritarian era's primary socio-political division becomes irrelevant because the democratization process roundly discredits one side of the division, the resulting party system in the democratic period is likely to feature a single major party and a host of small, disorganized, and inexperienced parties. Such asymmetric party competition is likely to produce a dominant party. This explanation accounts for the main features of Congress dominance in India, where the decolonization process discredited most of Congress' colonial-era competitors, leaving it to face a highly fragmented and disorganized opposition against which it could easily win elections. Ziegfeld concludes by reflecting on whether India is, today, on the cusp of a new dominant-party system under the BJP.

Adam Ziegfeld is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. He is the author of “Why Regional Parties? Clientelism, Elites, and the Indian Party System,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2016, as well as numerous articles on a range of topics related to political parties and elections.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at weisercenter@umich.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

World Literature has emerged as a vital field in twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies, one that reflects on the place and function of literatures in our global era. Straddling the established sub-disciplines of English and Comparative literatures, area studies, postcolonial studies and globalization studies, world literature urges new approaches across a comparative, multi-scalar, translational and inter-cultural space-time continuum; a continuum that poses a serious challenge to a one-world and totalizing model of literary production in our capitalist era. In this regard, both the ‘oceanic’ and the global south have emerged as powerful analytical frames. Oceans straddle traditional boundaries of nations, races, languages, literatures and cultures. The millennial-long history of the Indian Ocean, in particular, encompasses scales of contact that radically transform our grasp of the history of global capitalism entwining Euro-American and Afro-Asian worlds. This talk will focus on the resonance of Indian Ocean worlds to imagining the Global South as a cartographic frame in the post-Cold War era, and argue that the idea of world literature is unthinkable without this longue durée perspective.

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She works in the areas of world literature, postcolonial studies, the global Anglophone novel, Indian caste and dalit studies, Indian Ocean literary worlds, war and human rights, and technologies of violence. Her books include This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke 2016), Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge 2005), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (ed. 2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality (ed.2007). She is currently working on two projects: a two-volume Cambridge History of World Literature (forthcoming 2020), and a monograph provisionally called Catastrophic Form: Drones, Toxins, Climate. Debjani is the General Editor of a new CUP book series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature and serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Institute for World Literature (IWL), the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), and the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (University of the Bologna). She has held visiting positions &amp; fellowships at the University of Chicago (2010), University of Oxford (2012), University of Cambridge (2013), and University of Wisconsin Madison (2015).

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation South Asia Studies Professor and Asia Programs Director at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C.

From 2006-18, he was the Director of CASI, Professor of Political Science at Penn, and held the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to arriving at Penn, Professor Kapur was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. His research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, especially India.

His book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India, published by Princeton University Press in August 2010, earned him the 2012 ENMISA (Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of International Studies Association) Distinguished Book Award. Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs (co-authored with D. Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad), was published in July 2014 by Random House India. The Other One Percent: Indians in America (co-authored with Sanjoy Chakravorty and Nirvikar Singh), published in October 2016 by Oxford University Press, received widespread acclaim. His latest edited works are Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta), published in January 2017 by Orient BlackSwan, and Rethinking Public Institutions in India (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav), forthcoming in May 2017 by Oxford University Press.

Professor Kapur is the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize awarded to the best junior faculty, Harvard College, in 2005. He is a monthly contributor to the Business Standard. Professor Kapur holds a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University; an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota; and a Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

A racist assumption powerfully shapes many history books today: the idea that European knowledge traditions and Enlightenment sciences are superior to the epistemologies of the peoples once colonized by European empires. In this lecture Professor Khatun will explore methodologies of historical storytelling that seek to decolonize contemporary knowledge production about the past. Reading Bengali-language narratives of popular history that have enjoyed oral dissemination throughout the Bengal delta and sometimes across an Indian Ocean realm, Professor Khatun will show that we can use colonized peoples’ historiographical traditions as keys that offer escape from the prison house of colonial-modern thought.

Dr. Samia Khatun is a writer, filmmaker and cultural historian whose documentaries have screened on national broadcasters SBS-TV and ABC-TV in Australia. She was born in Dhaka, educated in Sydney and has held research fellowships in Berlin, Dunedin, New York and Melbourne. Her first book, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia was published in December 2018 and was shortlisted for the Ernst Scott Prize for History. She is currently embarking on a new project about the spinners and weavers of eighteenth-century Dhaka. In September 2019, Samia will be taking up the position of Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Free and open to the public.

Presented in partnership with the Center for South Asian Studies. This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

The World History and Literature Initiative (WHaLI) is a unique collaboration between area studies centers in the International Institute and the U-M School of Education, funded in part by Title VI grants from the U.S. Department of Education, with additional funding from the International Institute and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

About the conference:

Today we live in a world of a few hundred nation-states. “Yet,” historians Burbank and Cooper argue, “the world of nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old." People lived throughout most of human history in empires, states that never claimed to represent a single group of people or a nation. Such imperial systems were durable, ruling over vast territories for long durations of time. The Ottoman Empire and the Roman Empire, for example, each lasted for almost 700 years, the Mongols and Comanche Empires for about two centuries, while some have argued the Chinese Empire endured for well over 4,000 years. All empires faced resistance and rebellion in some form and to some degree.

Imperial systems and those who have opposed, resisted, and rebelled against imperial power, politics, and culture have played a long and important role in global history. Given how important empires, decolonization, and independence movements have been, it is not surprising that we have a rich historical, literary and artistic heritage that captures the impact empires and liberation from imperial control has had on individuals, peoples, communities, and the world.

The World History and Literature Initiative’s (WHaLI) three-day conference for secondary teachers will focus on these issues using examples drawn from different historical times and areas of the world. In addition to helping teachers develop their knowledge and understanding of this Empires, imperial practices, independence movements and decolonization in world history and literature, the conference also illuminates challenges students face in learning such content and explores ways teachers might meet those challenges. WHaLI conference provides participants with relevant resources as well as lunch and refreshments. This year we will meet on December 6 (Friday), December 7 (Saturday) and December 14 (Saturday).

The World History and Literature Initiative (WHaLI) is a unique collaboration between area studies centers in the International Institute and the U-M School of Education, funded in part by Title VI grants from the U.S. Department of Education, with additional funding from the International Institute and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

About the conference:

Today we live in a world of a few hundred nation-states. “Yet,” historians Burbank and Cooper argue, “the world of nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old." People lived throughout most of human history in empires, states that never claimed to represent a single group of people or a nation. Such imperial systems were durable, ruling over vast territories for long durations of time. The Ottoman Empire and the Roman Empire, for example, each lasted for almost 700 years, the Mongols and Comanche Empires for about two centuries, while some have argued the Chinese Empire endured for well over 4,000 years. All empires faced resistance and rebellion in some form and to some degree.

Imperial systems and those who have opposed, resisted, and rebelled against imperial power, politics, and culture have played a long and important role in global history. Given how important empires, decolonization, and independence movements have been, it is not surprising that we have a rich historical, literary and artistic heritage that captures the impact empires and liberation from imperial control has had on individuals, peoples, communities, and the world.

The World History and Literature Initiative’s (WHaLI) three-day conference for secondary teachers will focus on these issues using examples drawn from different historical times and areas of the world. In addition to helping teachers develop their knowledge and understanding of this Empires, imperial practices, independence movements and decolonization in world history and literature, the conference also illuminates challenges students face in learning such content and explores ways teachers might meet those challenges. WHaLI conference provides participants with relevant resources as well as lunch and refreshments. This year we will meet on December 6 (Friday), December 7 (Saturday) and December 14 (Saturday).

The World History and Literature Initiative (WHaLI) is a unique collaboration between area studies centers in the International Institute and the U-M School of Education, funded in part by Title VI grants from the U.S. Department of Education, with additional funding from the International Institute and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

About the conference:

Today we live in a world of a few hundred nation-states. “Yet,” historians Burbank and Cooper argue, “the world of nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old." People lived throughout most of human history in empires, states that never claimed to represent a single group of people or a nation. Such imperial systems were durable, ruling over vast territories for long durations of time. The Ottoman Empire and the Roman Empire, for example, each lasted for almost 700 years, the Mongols and Comanche Empires for about two centuries, while some have argued the Chinese Empire endured for well over 4,000 years. All empires faced resistance and rebellion in some form and to some degree.

Imperial systems and those who have opposed, resisted, and rebelled against imperial power, politics, and culture have played a long and important role in global history. Given how important empires, decolonization, and independence movements have been, it is not surprising that we have a rich historical, literary and artistic heritage that captures the impact empires and liberation from imperial control has had on individuals, peoples, communities, and the world.

The World History and Literature Initiative’s (WHaLI) three-day conference for secondary teachers will focus on these issues using examples drawn from different historical times and areas of the world. In addition to helping teachers develop their knowledge and understanding of this Empires, imperial practices, independence movements and decolonization in world history and literature, the conference also illuminates challenges students face in learning such content and explores ways teachers might meet those challenges. WHaLI conference provides participants with relevant resources as well as lunch and refreshments. This year we will meet on December 6 (Friday), December 7 (Saturday) and December 14 (Saturday).

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

How have Islamic doctrinal orientations, religious institutions, and governmental policies relating to Islam evolved since the establishment of Pakistan in 1947? What has constrained successive Pakistani governments in their policies and their initiatives in the religio-political sphere? What insight and lessons can the history of Pakistan offer for a better understanding of the relationship between Islam and politics in the contemporary world? These are among the questions that this talk will address.

Muhammad Qasim Zaman joined the Department of Near Eastern Studies of Princeton University in 2006. He has written on the relation­ship between religious and political institutions in medieval and modern Islam, on social and legal thought in the modern Muslim world, on institutions and traditions of learning in Islam, and on the flow of ideas between South Asia and the Arab Middle East. He is the author of Religion and Politics under the Early Abbasids (1997), The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (2002), Ashraf Ali Thanawi: Islam in Modern South Asia (2008), Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (2012), and Islam in Pakistan: A History (2018). With Robert W. Hefner, he is also the co-editor of Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (2007); with Roxanne L. Euben, of Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought (2009); and, as associate editor, with Gerhard Bowering et al., of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2013). Among his current projects is a book on South Asia and the wider Muslim world in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

The Partition of India and Pakistan, which brought in its wake a sea of displaced populations, meant it was not merely refugees and their effects but equally the identity documents that were issued to them prior to migration that suffered from a sense of displacement. Given that the figure of the refugee was alien to the memory of the colonial state, it was hardly surprising that there were no pre-existing genres of recognizing her. With the exception of Calcutta, Delhi received a disproportionate number of refugees compared to other cities and urban authorities had to grapple with the absence of an infrastructure of enumerating and identifying them. In this city, various actors such as the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, housing agencies, the Delhi administration and refugee associations acted in concert to fortify the process of rehabilitation from the chaos of displaced identity documents. While an official identity document, termed the refugee registration certificate did emerge, it was unrealistic for authorities to undertake rehabilitation on the strength of the scarce possession of this document. Simultaneously, urban rehabilitation authorities refused to exempt (Dalit, upper caste Hindu and Sikh) refugee ‘squatters’ from encumbrances of submitting evidence of their caste, nationality, displacement, entry, occupation and presence in the planned city. Using several genres of primary historical sources, this paper inquires into how the Indian state went about knowing the refugee dwelling in urban spaces in ways that straddle the philosophical and the feasible, the material and the intangible. In particular, it asks the question, what role did refugee knowledge play in the fashioning of identity documents between 1947 and 1960? This paper must also be read in another register, namely, the popular making and not just the popular life of identity documents in marginal spaces of dwelling at an early hour of state formation.

Tarangini Sriraman is author of In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India published by OUP India. The book weaves together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents in the urban margins of India. She teaches Politics and History at the School of Liberal Studies in Azim Premji University, Bangalore. She has previously been a South Asia Program Fellow, Cornell University, Postdoctoral Fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi and Visiting Associate Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. She has also received the Charles Wallace Research Grant, London. Her work has been published in journals like Economic and Political Weekly, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Film ScreeningFri, 16 Aug 2019 09:37:27 -04002020-04-01T18:30:00-04:002020-04-01T20:30:00-04:00Weiser HallCenter for South Asian StudiesFilm ScreeningWeiser HallCSAS Lecture Series | The Price of Acceptability: On South Asian Inclusion and Exclusion in the US (April 3, 2020 4:30pm)https://events.umich.edu/event/65325
65325-16571520@events.umich.eduEvent Begins: Friday, April 3, 2020 4:30pmLocation: Weiser HallOrganized By: Center for South Asian Studies

Bald will draw upon his past and ongoing historical research to trace out the ways that, for more than a century, South Asians have been simultaneously celebrated and vilified in U.S. popular culture and accepted only within narrowly and purposefully drawn limits as immigrants and citizens. He will examine a series of moments in South Asian American history - the "India Craze" at the turn of the 20th century; the shifting immigration laws of 1917 and 1965; the 1923 Supreme Court case of Bhagat Singh Thind; the 2016 presidential election - assessing how the "model minority" idea functions not simply as a myth, but as part of structures and processes of state discipline.

Vivek Bald is a scholar, filmmaker, and digital media producer whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). Bald's articles and essays have appeared in Souls, Dissent, South Asian Popular Culture, and the collections Black Routes to Islam, Asian Americans in Dixie, and With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire. His documentary films include Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994) and Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003). Bald is currently working on a second book, The Rise and Fall of "Prince" Ranji Smile: Fantasies of India at the Dawn of the American Century, as well as the transmedia "Bengali Harlem/Lost Histories Project" which includes a feature-length documentary film, "In Search of Bengali Harlem", slated for broadcast on PBS in 2012, and an accompanying web-based community history platform. He is Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies and Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of MIT's Open Documentary Lab.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

An award-winning documentary from the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, Nepal, that will take place in November 2019.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

What was a Muslim’s religious identity? What were the factors that influenced and shaped the making of his identity? Immediate, pragmatic, or deep historical and ideological? In my lecture I will first mention in brief how the markers of Muslim identity underwent change in the early phases of their evolution. I will then consider in some depth the role of the religious ideas in its formation in Mughal India. The discussion will be with special reference to the debates between the two major Sufi orders of the time, the Chishti and the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi, on some religious doctrines, ‘narrow’, sectarian or a non-sectarian and ‘pluralistic’. I will also consider some examples from the history of post-Mughal religious and political ideas.

Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago. He is a historian with field specialties in medieval and early modern South Asian Muslim religious and political cultures. His research interests also include comparative history of the Islamic world (as seen from an Indian perspective).

He has held visiting research and teaching positions in several academic institutions in Europe and America. His major publications include The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (1986, New Oxford India Perennial Edition, 2013); The Languages of Political Islam in India: c. 1200–1800 (2004); Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1400-1800 and Writing the Mughal World: Studies in Political Culture (co-authored with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 2007 and 2013).

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.